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Over the past decade, gamification’s popularity has broadened into many industries and has become embedded in consumers’ lives. As privacy protection and how firms utilize users’ data has been at the forefront of consumers’ minds, practitioners and academics alike need to understand consumers’ perceptions of the ethics of gamification. This paper aims to explore and provide preliminary evidence on young consumers’ perceptions of gamification and the ethics involved in these strategies used by firms.

The authors conducted two studies using a mixed-methods approach to gain a foundational understanding of young consumers’ perceptions of gamification. In Study 1, interviews provided initial insights and helped inform an exploratory survey administered in Study 2 to 161 young consumers attending a university in the southwest region of the USA.

The findings indicate that consumers have positive attitudes toward gamification tactics as long as the rewards are sufficient. Further, consumers do not find gamification as unethical as long as they have control over having the ability to opt-in.

Previous research has examined gamification from several contexts including health care, education and the workplace. However, there is little research that focuses on gamification from the consumers’ perspective, specifically the young consumer. As more firms are using gamification tactics such as on their mobile applications, it is critical to understand how young consumers perceive gamification and how that can impact the consumer-brand relationship. This research offers two studies as a first step in investigating young consumers’ perceptions of gamification tactics firms use and offers several future directions.

Many K-12 teachers teach difficult topics as part of their curricula, and discussions of difficult topics are common across grade levels and content areas. As teachers increasingly engage with difficult topics in their classrooms, the need for high-quality professional learning experiences has also grown. In response, the purpose of this article is to introduce an emerging partnership between the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education Initiative at Penn State and the Red Lion Area School District (Red Lion, Pennsylvania), conceptualized from the outset with an explicit focus on intentionally engaging in collaborative, inquiry-based professional learning surrounding difficult topics in formalized curricula and within educational practice.

The article briefly describes how the partners came together, then provides a high-level overview of how they approached their first year of collaboration. Next, the partners’ adaptation of inquiry-based professional learning is outlined. The article concludes by discussing lessons learned from the first year of partnering and implications for scholarship in the areas of school-university partnerships, inquiry-based professional learning, and difficult topics.

The article observes that it took educators participating in a difficult-topics inquiry community an entire year to begin shifting ownership of inquiry to K-12 students. It illustrates how school-university partnerships can be used to support difficult-topics inquiry and raises new questions about the role of difficult topics in partnership work.

The article contributes an original example to the literature that demonstrates how inquiry-based professional learning focused on difficult topics can provide a powerful basis for forming a school-university partnership.